A few months ago, during a glorious week off of laying on my couch in pajamas surrounded by takeout containers, a mind-numbing amount of time was spent deciphering the beautiful indie game Fez. The perpetual state of unbrushed hair and pizza fingers is easily attributed to the tunnel vision caused by need to solve just one more goddamned puzzle, so I can put down my XBOX controller and sleep. I’ve always been a sucker for side-scrollers.

Yesterday was a special day. Yesterday was the day a FedEx courier knocked on my door to deliver a package I’ve been anticipating for weeks. Yesterday was the day I signed in acceptance to receive the Fujinon XF 60mm f/2.4. Finally a macro lens to add to my resume.

Being a fan of finding new creative outlets, this past year I’ve taken up a new hobby; photography. It’s been interesting to explore the ways you can leverage a camera to go beyond the every day subject matter of landscapes and people, and light painting is a way to use the real world as a canvas to draw on. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, light painting is a unique way of capturing shapes, expressions, or drawn pictures using light as a paintbrush and your camera as the canvas.

Light painting done on an idle streetcar in San Francisco. Taken with the Fuji X-E1 | Fujinon 14mm f2.8 | 30s exposure

I don’t usually get sick. I’ve started biking around the city in an attempt to get my body moving more, and it seems the “fresh” San Francisco air has caused me to come down with a terrible cold. Go figure.

The benefit of illness is it forces me to stay indoors and gives me an opportunity to pay attention to hobbies I otherwise tend to neglect. Illustrator took care of me, taking my mind of the rapidly growing pile of Kleenex on my floor. Date night with AI, here’s the result.

About three years ago in 2011 — before Animate, before joining Adobe, before motion paths, gradients, responsive scaling and audio — there was Edge. Edge (now rebranded as “Edge Animate” as a celebration of our 1.0) was a beta project being worked on by Adobe not yet released to the public.

Before I begin, let me be clear on one thing: I am not a feminist. I’m fairly unsympathetic to the notion of women being unable to pursue their dreams in whatever capacity they choose simply because they’re women. I often roll my eyes at campaigns that cast women in a negative light alongside men – such as this anti-sexism spot by Pantene which recently made waves across the Internet — because it further perpetuates the stereotype that women ought to be considered an oppressed minority in the workplace. Totally understand there’s a world for that and that’s cool, just not my thing. Love what you do, own it, make goals for yourself and devote every waking second of your being to achieve them. Gender isn’t a deciding factor in one’s ability to get shit done.

The web is brimming with infographics. Where did they start, and where are they headed? What are the principles intrepid infographic designers abide by, and how do they apply to you? In this article we’ll discuss the illimitable power of data visualization, how to approach good infographic design and the importance of interactive design on the web.

Infographics are a timeless way to represent data, and have been used for centuries much in the same way we use them today. When used properly, infographics make it easier to quickly convey a wealth of information in a small amount of space to communicate otherwise dry or hard to interpret information.

Ever want to control your timeline animations in Animate with a scrubber? Here’s the sample to do so! Download the below files to learn how to create draggable scrubbers (both horizontal and vertical) so you can drag to control the timeline of symbols in Edge Animate CC. Use this technique to create scrubbable timelines, infographics, guide your audience through a story or anything else you can think of. These samples work for both touch and mouse events so they’re mobile and desktop friendly.

There’s a number of lucrative reasons to take the bull by the horns and dive into front-end web languages including HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But why is this important? Coding isn’t the final product, so how does it apply to you? When designing in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or any other design application, code can be a blissful afterthought as you create, but it certainly plays an integral role in the final product that you do produce when targeting digital mediums. In order to produce the highest quality design possible, you need to know what goes into it. That requires learning code.

I love UI kits and so can you. My inner designer has been nagging for a fresh project and the result is Lucent UI, a new UI kit fresh out of the Photoshop oven. I took a slightly different approach to the design of this kit, placing an emphasis on graphing and plotting (bitches love data visualization) over traditional UI elements. Some of the charts are linked as Illustrator Smart Objects for easier replotting of visual data points. Every element is vector based, retina ready and distributed through layers. Text and colours are easily editable. This kit is completely free for use for personal or commercial projects.